Dora Vargha

Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter and will be joining Humboldt University’s Department of History in September 2021. She is a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Her work focuses on questions of global health and biomedical research in the Cold War era, using the locality of Eastern Europe as a starting point.

Her current collaborative project, After the End of Disease critically addresses and dislocates geographies and narratives of disease and health. She is exploring ways to think about international and global public health outside of the framework of Geneva and US-based NGOs; and to question straightforward scripts of beginnings, crises and endings when it comes to disease. 

In the next five years, Dora will be leading two research groups on interconnected projects. “Connecting Three Worlds,” a Wellcome Collaborative Award based at the University of Exeter will be exploring socialist networks in global health history together with co-investigators Dr. Sarah Marks (Birkbeck) and Prof. Edna Suarez-Diaz (UNAM). At Humboldt, Dora will be leading the ERC Starting Grant research group “Socialist Medicine: an Alternative Global Health History.”